Sunday, 11 May 2008

Playing With Fire

(teabelly note: my friend jeff told me about this exhibit and how eerily it reminded him of the bejing olympics this year. i haven't seen it, but i really want to go and thought it might be important for others to hear about this too...)

The happy faces are the most striking. Throughout the exhibition "The Nazi Olympics" at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, there is a disturbing sense of high spirits in many of the photographs. Smiling, carefree crowds enjoying the spectacle, caught up in the drama, transported by the visceral thrill of being in the same open-air arena with tens of thousands of equally giddy people.

The athletes, too, look happy. Jesse Owens, the African American track-and-field star who would embarrass Adolf Hitler by winning prolifically, wears an unaffected and sheepish grin. Marty Glickman, a Jewish runner who would be pulled from the American relay team for reasons that remain mysterious, is seen in training before the Olympics, beaming and squinting in the sun aboard the SS Manhattan, the ship that took the American team to Germany for the event.

Part of the dissonance in these ebullient images is an illusion of history. In the summer of 1936, although Hitler's animosity to Jewish, non-Aryan and other marginal groups was no mystery, the Holocaust hadn't happened yet. The seizure of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, the annexation of Austria and the invasion of Poland were still a few years away. Hitler was a menace and his racial policies repellent. This was enough to inspire farsighted people to argue strenuously against participating in what would become one of the dictator's greatest propaganda coups. But the Olympic Games were also, for many people, a pleasant punctuation in the gathering storm.

"We all want to be wishful thinkers," said Sara Bloomfield, director of the Holocaust Museum.

Since their reinvention for modern times in 1896, the Olympics have emerged as a collective and mostly fruitless exercise in wishful thinking, practiced en masse. The rhetoric of peaceful athletic competition among a brotherhood of nations barely masks the nationalist posturing and the crass commercialism underlying the whole thing. And it's a rare Olympics that is conducted without some kind of political hypocrisy just under the surface.

Just in time for another Olympics, and another debate about the permeable boundary between Olympic sport and international politics, the Holocaust Museum is reprising its 1996 exhibition devoted to the infamous Games of '36. The powerful show, which has traveled extensively since it opened more than a decade ago, has been reinstalled, with the addition of new artifacts.

Front and center is new material about the famous torch relay, which in many ways became the defining symbol of the Berlin Games. Outside the exhibition, the show's designers have painted on the floor a graphic borrowed from a vintage poster advertising the relay -- a map showing the cities through which the torch passed on its way from Olympia in Greece to Berlin. And the exhibit opens with a case containing one of the original torch holders, an elegantly designed piece of steel made by Krupp, the infrastructure purveyor to the Third Reich.

Susan Bachrach, curator of special exhibitions, points out that the poster with the map of the torch relay was the source of some considerable controversy in 1936. Although the version displayed in this show is completely free of any Nazi iconography, an earlier version showed the European map with the Sudetenland already annexed by Germany. This was not taken lightly by the Czechs. And it can stand as a powerful emblem for how little Nazi intentions were hidden during the Games.

They had, for instance, already rounded up Berlin's Gypsies into concentration camps outside the city. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which prescribed punishment of hard labor or imprisonment for intermarriage or sexual relations between Jewish and non-Jewish people, were in force. And the country's military ambitions had been betrayed by its military seizure of the Rhineland only months before the Games began.

Germans saluting Hitler in an image from "The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936," the U.S. Holocaust Museum's reinstallation of a 1996 exhibition on the infamous Games. (U.s. Holocaust Memorial Museum)

On the other hand, orders came down from the top that egregious anti-Semitic displays would be put on hold while the world visited Berlin. Rabid newspapers were removed from the newsstands. And although Jews had been purged from German athletics, a few token "non-Aryan" athletes were allowed on the German team, after extraordinary international pressure. Among them was the fencer Helen Mayer, who was part Jewish and living in the United States at the time. She returned to Germany to compete for the German team at the request of the Reich's Sports Office leader. It was an odd decision, inexplicable in many ways, and it's almost uncanny when you see her in a brief film clip making the Nazi salute on the medal platform (she took silver in the women's individual foil).

The exhibition is filled with similar curiosities and contradictions. Efforts to boycott the Games forced Americans to think about Jim Crow laws in the South, which discriminated against African Americans in ways that seemed very similar to the early stages of anti-Semitic discrimination in Germany. And the fact that Hitler got his hands on the Olympics was itself a historical accident. When the Games were awarded to Germany in 1931, Hitler was not yet in power. Olympic officials hoped the Games would celebrate Germany's reentry into the community of nations after the First World War.

Even the torch relay, which fit so easily and powerfully into the Nazi pantheon of political imagery, was invented by someone who was not himself a committed Nazi. Credit goes to Carl Diem, later a respected sports historian and a member of the postwar German Olympic committee.

It was an inspired idea, and it offered great material for Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi film meister who produced the brilliant "Olympia" based on the 1936 Games. It was very likely Diem who first approached Riefenstahl (he admired her "Triumph of the Will") and perhaps he deserves a little credit for one of the most extraordinary sequences in 20th-century filmmaking: Through the fog and mists of time, classical Greece emerges, and then bursts into new life, as a chiseled and shirtless torchbearer dips his wand into the sacred flames. It was operatic, it was Wagnerian, it was Promethean, it was a perfect image.

This sort of imagery still pervades the Olympics, which in many ways remain under the shadow of Berlin. It's impossible to walk through the current exhibition without feeling a repetition syndrome. Just as Jim Crow laws blunted the force of moral outrage against the Nazis, the specter of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo has blunted the force of arguments about Chinese political repression.

Then, as now, arguments for a boycott were countered with claims that the Games shouldn't be politicized and that it would be unfair to the athletes not to participate. Avery Brundage, the head of the U.S. Olympic Association (precursor to the U.S. Olympic Committee), pronounced the dispute a "Jew-Nazi" conflict that shouldn't intrude on the independence and integrity of the Games. And the penchant of Olympic officials for Orwellian turns of phrase continues today. Jacques Rogge, current head of the International Olympic Committee, has said that his group is engaged in "silent diplomacy" with Chinese officials over human rights- and Tibet-related issues.

But most galling, and a little-known chapter that should have discredited them out of existence, was the IOC's decision to hold the 1940 Winter Games . . . in Germany. The decision was made in June 1939, after plans to hold them in St. Moritz, Switzerland, fell apart. Even after the Kristallnacht and four years of Hitler's saber-rattling, Germany was once again deemed an acceptable (if last-minute) host of the Olympics. Those Games never happened, though Bachrach points out that the IOC offer to Germany was never rescinded. It was Germany that pulled out of the deal, perhaps because it had invaded Poland in September 1939.

Today's Olympic pageantry still feels quasi-Fascist, with its banners and torches and parading athletes. Perhaps that can't be helped. But lurking in the Holocaust Museum show, in perverse form, is a good idea that might cleanse the Olympics of the political sideshow that has made the torch run to the Beijing Olympics so problematic. Hitler's plan, after conquering the world, was to move the Olympics permanently to Nuremberg.

This idea might productively be adapted by rethinking the premise that the Games must be held in a different city each time, which only encourages an orgy of barely disguised nationalist propaganda. Perhaps the Summer Games should be permanently returned to Greece, where they were first held and where they were successfully held in 2004. And the orchestration of the spectacle should be conducted by a truly international committee, divesting it of anything particular to one country or another. Then, perhaps, the Games would emerge as a truly international, apolitical and open celebration of sport.

That's unlikely to happen, as long as the IOC remains a feckless group and the world is filled with ambitious nations. The current system, in which cities compete for the privilege, and then stage elaborate self-congratulatory spectacles, serves too many people too well. It energizes local fundraising, it excites advertisers and sponsors, it provides new and interesting backdrops for the media, and, in the case of the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, which were rocked by bribery scandals, it lines the pockets of unscrupulous Olympic officials. But it also empowers ugly forces of nationalism, and reminds the world, again and again, that behind the smiles and protestations of goodwill and sportsmanship, the Games are always political and will remain so as long as politicians are allowed to manipulate their symbolism.

The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936, through Aug. 17 at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, just south of Independence Avenue SW, between 14th Street and Raoul Wallenberg Place. Daily 10 a.m-5:30 p.m. (Monday-Friday 10 a.m.-6:30 p.m. through June 13). Museum admission is free. No passes are needed for the Olympics exhibition; free timed passes are necessary only for the permanent exhibition, "The Holocaust," and can be obtained at the museum or in advance by calling http://Tickets.com at 800-400-9373. For more information visit http://www.ushmm.org.

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